This page is written by the game's inventor, Joe Joyce. This game is a favorite of its inventor.

Great Shatranj

Introduction

As chess evolved from shatranj in the West, pieces gained
power by becoming long-range sliders, producing an abstract game
where most pieces can cross an open board in a single turn.
Eastern variants stay closer to the beginnings of the game, which
featured a number of short-range sliders and leapers, but the
power pieces still seem to be long-range. What if long-range
pieces did not come to be so dominant? Suppose the short-range
pieces of chess' infancy became more powerful by gaining
additional short-range moves? Great Shatranj examines some
potentials of these pieces, offering 5 different pieces that
slide 1 square or jump 2 squares. Each player has up to 8 leapers
on the board, giving the game a noticeably different flavor.

This game is taken from "Two
Large Shatranj Variants", which contains a complete list
of alternate pieces and optional rules. All presets use
"Grand Shatranj Alfaerie" piece sets. The Alfaerie
piece sets were created by David Howe. The Grand Shatranj piece
set includes some new pieces by Joe Joyce, created for Mr. Howe's
Alfaerie set. The presets do not rules check. Players are
encouraged to try out different pieces.

Setup

Great Shatranj D

Great Shatranj R

Click on either setup above for the preset

Pieces

King. The royal piece. This is the
standard chess king, moving 1 square in any direction. The king
may not move into check.

General. Moves as the king, 1 square
orthogonally or diagonally.

Minister. Moves like the knight, dababbah,
or wazir. It slides 1 or jumps 2 squares orthogonally, or jumps
in the standard knight's "L".

High priestess. Moves like the knight,
alfil, or ferz. It slides 1 or jumps 2 squares diagonally, or
jumps in the standard knight's "L".

Elephant. Moves as an alfil or ferz. It
may slide 1 or jump 2 squares diagonally.

kNight. This is the standard chess knight,
jumping 2 squares, one orthogonally and the second diagonally
outward.

dababba [Y]. Moves as a dabbabah or wazir.
It may slide 1 or jump 2 squares orthogonally. (Y? Because I ran
out of letters.)

Rook. Optional replacement for dababba. A
standard rook, sliding any number of squares orthogonally.

Rules

Win by checkmate or by baring the opponent's king without your
king immediately being bared by your opponent. Any other outcome
is a draw.

Pawns promote on the eighth rank. Pawns may always promote to
a general.

Pawns may promote to lost pieces, with restrictions. One pawn
may promote to either (lost) member of the following 4 pairs of
pieces: dababbas; knights; elephants; minister-high priestess. If
promoting to a lost elephant, the pawn must promote to the
opposite color of a surviving elephant.

There is no castling. As there is no pawn first move double
step, there is no en passant.

Notes

This game was playtested by David Paulowich. He suggested the
option of a rook in our initial discussions, as he felt people
would find the dababba too weak. Then he checkmated me with a dababba in
our playtest game. Tactics in this game can get rather sharp.

Optional Rules

As this game has been played, a few people have offered suggestions. Following are the ones that people might reasonably and easily implement.

Several people have suggested that the pawns get an initial double step. The two people I remember making the suggestion are Jeremy Good and Graeme Neatham. I, personally, would be more inclined to use it in Grand Shatranj than here, but several players have mentioned it over the past couple of years, so I offer it to you here. If you decide to use it, the players then must decide whether en passant or passar battaglia rules are used.

HG Muller implemented this game in one of his software engines, but uses the "Jumping General" [pasha: DWAF] as the default piece in place of the "general" [guard, man: WF], stating he preferred the 2-square range piece as more compatible with the other non-royal pieces.

LL Smith suggests a "king's leap" of 2 squares in any direction, possibly including capture, as a reasonable analog to castling. This 2 square leap [with optional capture] occurs only on the king's initial move, and can be further restricted by not allowing the king to start, move through, or land in check. I feel this rule is obviously in keeping with the spirit of the game.
He also suggests a new set-up. The back rank would be: D N M E G K E H N R

Game design by Joe Joyce.

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Comments

Larry, if you go through the comments for this page, you'll find some comments by HG Muller on piece values there. In general, he values the minister at 6.33 pawns and the High Priestess at 6.50. The guard, he values for the endgame at 3.2, but more like 2.8 at setup. And he makes the comment that all the pieces in this game that are analogs to pieces that can mate in regular Capa can mate in this game. Start about in the middle of the 30 comments.
Mats, you've made an interesting point in saying that one needn't exhaust one's brain in this game, which fits kind of next to Larry's comment about being able to recover in this game. In FIDE, tactics, from the nature of the pieces being generally infinite sliders, is always active. While you certainly could use a strategy, it's 'positional play', aka: tactics, which often determines the game, and always has at least an indirect effect on the outcome. In Great Shatranj, strategy is always active, but tactics tends to happen more sporadically, with intense bursts for 5 - 10 turns at a time, followed by a bit of strategic picking up of the pieces. In closed games, given that no piece here has a blockable move, I suspect the tactics would be more varied, intense, and far-reaching. These pieces are made for close-in, with wide, short footprints. The High Priestess attacks 8 forward squares [and 8 rearward], every turn, unblockably. Does the B+N?

Larry, Mats, thanks for your comments. You bring up a lot of topics. First, some statistics: of 10 games completed, 8 were won by resignation, one by time, in 33 moves [although the position was very poor for the loser - it appeared a resignation around turn 40 was clearly possible], and one by mate - with a breakaway Minister and High Priestess literally cornering the king, in 69 moves. The resignations lasted from 11 to 79 turns. So, for all games, # turns/game = 11, 20, 21, 33, 43, 45, 49, 50, 69, 79.
While it's not a huge sample, it looks like hundred-turn game would exist, but be rare, and if the numbers hold approximately true, most games will end within around 50 turns or so. I don't know the numbers, but isn't this fairly close to FIDE norms, at most a bit longer, not a lot?
Hey, Larry, has it occurred to you that you might just play a pretty good game of shortrange? Being a Jetan master and all? ;-) You came out of that slightly premature attack very well, and our game right now is almost at a standstill. We've achieved a balance of forces across most of the board. But the final battle is not even showing an outline yet; it's just the first faint stirring of pieces, with no form or center.
And this speaks to both Mats comment about the appeal of the game being its slowness and your comment about having a chance to recover. A so-far common pattern in these games is that many show a major battle involving, and costing, about half the pieces per side, occurring early midgame. Then the 2 sides re-group, and often a final key battle is fought, with one side generally coming out of that the clear winner. The short games are when one side is clearly losing after the initial battle, and resigns. [Or when one side gets blitzed by the other through differential skill in handling these almost familiar but rather tricky pieces.] The 40-50 turn games are when one side has either lost the 2nd battle, or never got its pieces together enough after the first battle to fight effectively. I suspect the longer the game the better the players are, or at least they're very evenly matched, at whatever skill level.

The game can definitely let a player recover from an error. Maintaining the exchange ratio appears to be necessary.
I anticipate that the current game I'm playing will exceed 70 turns. Looking at the potential of a hundred-turn game will often scare the impatient. ;-)
Has anyone determined the various combinations of pieces needed in the endgame? I like the pattern that a Minister and Dabbaba take when cornering the opposing King.

The relative attractancy of this sort of game lies just in this, namely that it is slow. One needn't exhaust one's brain. Yet it is complex enough to create strategical complexity. When chess was slow, in medieval times, it was extremely popular, also among women. The later faster game was more about performance and was regarded as less enjoyable by many people. However, the more devoted gamesters became even more enchanted.
/Mats